GPU Artifacts? Sort Software vs Dying VRAM Before You RMA (2026)

By LK Wood IV · 2026-07-10 · ~10 min read · St. Louis County, MO

A GPU artifact is a frame that came out of the card wrong. Colored lines, snow, blocks with shifted colors, textures stretched into garbage and triangles shooting off a model are the shapes it takes. Some come from a dying card. Others come from a cable, a bad driver install, one game’s shader cache, heat or an overclock, and two checks sort them before you spend anything: does the glitch show up in a screenshot, and does it show on the BIOS screen before Windows loads?

I would run the screenshot first — it is a quick first check and tells you which half of this page you need.

What each artifact points to

Find the look and where it shows, then run the test in the fourth column. Snow and lines are the two looks the sources split on. NZXT calls snow “More typical of a cable or connection fault”, and Playtool puts “wobbly vertical lines” on the digital connection, while Playtool also lists “Arrays of dots or vertical and horizontal lines” as a video RAM artifact. For those two, the screenshot decides.

Step 1: Screenshot it

Artifacts you see on the monitor are born in one of two places. On the render side, the card built a broken frame. On the display path, a good frame got damaged between the card’s memory and the panel. A screenshot splits the two, because, in NZXT’s words, “A screenshot captures the rendered frame before it reaches the cable”. A short OBS Studio recording captures the same frames and catches a glitch that comes and goes. Open the file on a phone or another PC.

A clean capture moves the search downstream. It does not clear the card. Playtool’s diagnostic page (Mark Allen, last updated April 23, 2008) says a clean screenshot points at “a problem with your monitor or with the video output circuitry of your video card”, and adds “Most of the time it’s the monitor rather than the video output circuitry”. A September 2020 Tom’s Hardware forum thread shows why the card stays a suspect. An RTX 2070 Super passed the screenshot test and kept artifacting when its owner swapped the DisplayPort cable for HDMI and the monitor for a TV, while an RX 480 ran clean on the same monitor and cable. The owner blamed the 2070 Super and was also running a 500 W supply under the 650 W minimum they cited; the thread never posted a PSU swap or an RMA result. Step 6 ends with the second-card swap, and Step 4 with a second PC.

If the glitch is lines, the guide to lines on a monitor has the monitor-menu test that isolates the panel.

Then note where the artifacts appear.

• One game only. Playtool: “If you’re seeing visual artifacts in just one program then it may be a software problem”. Suspect that game, its shader cache or a driver bug in it (Step 2).
• Every game, clean desktop. Playtool names heat, overclocks and bad video RAM; AMD’s stability checklist adds drivers.
• The BIOS or boot screen. Hardware. Playtool: “If you see artifacts during the power-up screens before your operating system loads then you know it has nothing to do with drivers”. Try the card in a second PC before you spend anything.

Ghosting and trails that are not a dying card

Faint trails or afterimages behind moving objects and lights are a different thing. NVIDIA’s DLSS 4 announcement from January 2025 lists “less ghosting” among the gains of its new transformer model for Super Resolution, Ray Reconstruction and DLAA, which makes ghosting a known side effect of the upscaler rather than a hardware fault.

Two features do this.

• DLSS upscaling. NVIDIA’s announcement above is the source; the new model’s pitch is “improved temporal stability, less ghosting”.
• Frame generation. Generated frames are interpolated between rendered ones. TechSpot’s Tim Schiesser (May 2026) notes that at a low base frame rate “the generated frames need to interpolate much more to fill in the gaps”, and that each frame stays on screen longer, “making artifacts more visible”. The frame generation explainer covers where they smear.

The test follows Step 1’s logic. Compare the same scene at native resolution with DLSS and frame generation off. If the trails go, it was the feature. DLAA is not a clean comparison, because NVIDIA’s transformer model runs DLAA too.

Trails that show on the monitor and not in a recording happened after the frame left the card’s memory. Treat them like any clean capture and go to Step 6, where the card’s output is still a suspect.

Trails from the feature are not a fault. Failing memory or a failing die draws lines, blocks or snow, or breaks geometry, as in the gallery above.

Step 2: Rule out software first

Before you spend anything, clear the causes that cost nothing, in this order.

Reset any overclock. If you have raised the core clock, the memory clock or the voltage in MSI Afterburner or the card’s own software, set it back to default. Playtool’s page puts it flatly, “Overclocking often causes artifacts”, and warns that the damage can come later: “The overclock may work properly at first and then artifacts only start showing up weeks or months later after the chips have been sufficiently damaged”. Stock clocks clear an unstable overclock; they do not undo that damage. AMD’s stability checklist names “Unstable overclocking and overheating” among its causes.

Reinstall the driver clean. AMD’s checklist lists outdated or corrupted drivers among the causes too. Download the current driver from NVIDIA, AMD or Intel, then follow Wagnardsoft’s DDU guide. Disconnect from the internet so Windows can’t install a driver of its own, run Display Driver Uninstaller in Safe Mode (the guide recommends it and calls it optional), use Clean and restart, and install the downloaded driver before you reconnect. AMD’s own route is the Factory Reset option in its installer, or the AMD Cleanup Utility before the new package.

Reset the shader cache if it is one game. On Radeon, Adrenalin has a Reset Shader Cache button that “can be used to delete all stored shader cache files” (AMD article DH3-012, last updated March 3, 2025). Windows keeps its own DirectX Shader Cache, which Disk Cleanup lists and clears: Microsoft’s D3D12 shader cache specification calls it “Integrated with disk cleanup”, and a community answer on Microsoft’s Q&A forum from February 2019 notes that it “will regenerate & fill again” after you delete it. Then read the driver’s release notes for that game, where AMD tells you to look for a documented known issue.

If artifacts survive all three, keep going. Two more free checks come before the card is written off.

Step 3: Check the temperature

Install HWiNFO and watch the GPU temperature, plus the memory junction temperature on cards that report it, while the artifacts appear. Playtool’s page says “Overheating is a common cause of artifacts”, and gives the bluntest test for it: “You can prove that it’s an overheating problem by running your computer with the case open and aiming a desk fan at the video card”. Glitches that show under load and stop when the card idles and cools point at heat. The GPU overheating guide has the hotspot-minus-core test that tells dried paste from dust.

I may earn a commission if you buy through these affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

The fixes are physical and cheap. With the PC shut down and unplugged, blow the dust out of the heatsink and fans with compressed air (Amazon · Newegg), confirm every fan spins under load (if one doesn’t, see GPU Fans Not Spinning), and improve case airflow. On an older card whose paste has dried out, repaste it with fresh thermal paste (Amazon · Newegg). Follow the card maker’s model-specific service instructions before opening the cooler.

Step 4: Test the VRAM and confirm hardware

If the card is cool, at stock clocks and on a clean driver, and it still artifacts, test the memory. Playtool’s examples of bad video RAM are color shifts in small blocks (“there are substantial color shifts within the little bars”), “Arrays of dots or vertical and horizontal lines”, and long thin spikes shooting off 3D objects.

Run a memory test at stock clocks first. memtest_vulkan is a free, open-source VRAM test; its standard run lasts 5-6 minutes because, as its README puts it, “To catch such errors some pre-heat time is needed”. OCCT has a VRAM test too. GPU Solutions, a board-level repair shop, wrote in July 2026 that software tests like these “can identify that something is wrong, but they cannot tell you which chip is bad”.

Then lower the memory clock. Playtool’s reasoning is that lower clocks cool the chips and “often allows weak ones to work properly”. In MSI Afterburner, drop the memory clock one step at a time and retest after each step, then set it back to stock. Playtool: “If underclocking makes the artifacts go away then you know you have a hardware problem”. If a lower memory clock stops the artifacts, keep that result in the repair log. It points toward hardware instability but does not identify a failed memory chip. Keep the memtest_vulkan log for the RMA.

For a load or temperature check, use a stress test separately from the VRAM error test. Stop at once if temperatures pass the card’s limit, the screen goes black, the PC crashes or the artifacting gets worse. There is nothing to learn from cooking a failing card.

Two patterns make the card worth testing in another system: the artifacts reproduce in several games, and they persist with other monitors and cables. Before you blame the card, put it in a second PC with a power supply that meets its requirement: AMD’s stability checklist puts the PSU, motherboard and memory on the same list, and the 2070 Super owner in Step 1 was running a 500 W supply. When the corruption survives a clean driver on every screen and in the second PC, what is left is the card itself: its memory, the GPU die or the board’s power delivery.

Step 5: The physical causes

Check the mechanical side before you accept a dead card. None of it shows up in software.

• Power connectors. Shut down, switch off and unplug the PSU, then firmly re-seat every PCIe or 12V-2×6 power cable at both ends. AMD’s stability checklist asks whether the power supply meets the “recommended power requirements for the system” and whether aftermarket parts such as “custom sleeved cables, PCIe riser cables/adapters” are in the path.
• The board at the slot. Droop itself is harmless, but while the card is out, look at the PCB beside the slot lock: the GPU sag page covers the cracked Gigabyte RTX 40 boards Tom’s Hardware documented there and how to measure droop; a GPU support bracket (Amazon · Newegg) takes the load off the slot.

On a laptop the playbook shrinks. You can’t move the GPU into a second PC, so run the free checks (overclock utility reset, clean driver, shader cache, dust out of the vents), then plug in an external monitor and screenshot both screens. Glitches in the capture point at the GPU or its memory. A clean capture with a glitchy built-in screen points at the panel, its cable or the laptop’s display output. Past that it is a warranty or board-repair case; follow the maker’s service instructions before opening it.

Step 6: When it’s the display path (clean capture)

If your Step 1 capture came back clean, the frame was fine in the card’s memory. Swap in a known-good video cable, then try another port on the card, another input on the monitor, a standard refresh rate and a second monitor, one change at a time so you know which swap cleared it. If a different screen and cable are clean, the original monitor or cable is the fault. Monitor Keeps Going Black? has the full display-side walk-through.

If the glitch stays on every screen and cable, the card’s own output is still a suspect. Playtool, on a tinted screen: “It can occasionally be the video card so you really need to swap parts to be sure”. Put a second graphics card, or the CPU’s integrated graphics, on the same screen and cable. If that runs clean, the first card is the suspect, which is where the RTX 2070 Super’s owner in the Tom’s Hardware thread landed; the thread never posted an RMA result.

When it’s genuinely dying: RMA or repair

If the artifacts follow the card into a second suitable PC after the checks above, take the test log and captures to the manufacturer or a repair shop. The warranty determines which route I would try first.

• Under warranty, RMA it. Send the captures and the VRAM-test log with the claim; the manufacturer repairs or replaces it and you are not gambling on a fix.
• Out of warranty, weigh repair against replacement. GPU Solutions calls a card repairable when “the failure is localized to one or two chips and the rest of the card is healthy”, and not when several chips, the memory controller or the core have failed. Its rule on cost: “A repair that costs 30-40% of a used replacement is usually worth it”. If you replace the card, match a current graphics card to your power supply and case, and fix the PSU too if your testing implicated it.

Before you spend anything, confirm that the artifacts follow the card into a second PC. A failing power supply or a bad cable can frame a good GPU, and the tests above exist so you retire only a card that is done.

The quick version

1. Screenshot or record the artifacts. In the capture, it’s the render side (Steps 2 to 5). A clean capture points at the cable, the monitor or the card’s output (Step 6).
2. Trails or afterimages? If they appear only with DLSS or frame generation on and stop at native resolution with both off, it’s the feature.
3. Where does it show? One game points at its shader cache; every game at the driver, heat, clocks or VRAM; the BIOS screen at hardware.
4. Do the free software pass. Reset the overclock, reinstall the driver clean with DDU, reset the shader cache.
5. Check heat in HWiNFO. Dust, fans and a repaste fix heat-driven artifacts.
6. Confirm hardware. memtest_vulkan errors at stock on a cool card, or artifacts that stop at a lower memory clock, point toward hardware instability; glitches in every game, on every monitor and cable, and in a second PC confirm a hardware fault.
7. Then RMA it or weigh repair against replacement, after proving the card fails in a second machine.

For the driver side in depth, see Fix GPU Driver Crashes. If the card isn’t showing up at all, that’s a different branch, covered in Graphics Card Not Detected.